Five Reasons Not To Celebrate The Parliamentary Left Victory In “France”

France is currently involved in the violent repression of an anti-colonial uprising in the Pacific archipelago of Kanaky. The French have occupied the islands for over 170 years.

Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyane, St. Barth, and half the island of Soualiga continue to be held as colonies by the government in Paris, which euphemistically renamed its possessions “overseas collectivities” to avoid UN scrutiny. Most of the human population of these communities are the descendants of Africans, kidnapped and transported across the Atlantic ocean to be exploited for generations by European slaveholders.

Would you give away your homeland to be exploited as a testing space for nuclear bombs—while you were still living there? As have other empires against other indigenous peoples, France imposed this situation on those living on the hundreds of Polynesian islands without bothering to wait for an answer. Predictably, many have decided enough is enough.

Mainland France, also known as l’hexagone, is a central player in the international border regime that has been responsible for untold thousands of deaths in the Mediterranean and the English Channel. Through its colonies La Réunion and Maoré, it even extends the regime of displacement and deportation into the Indian Ocean.

Alongside its political and military support for the Israeli government, French official philosemitism and the decades-long imprisonment of Georges Abdallah are particular examples of a consistent practice of European white supremacy. Just as many of us would reject arguments to hail the victory of a left-wing “Israeli” party as anything other than a rebrand of the old colonial machine, we should regard the domestic politics of its longtime ally “France”—which has carried out equally brutal massacres for much longer—with the same perspective.